Customer Success: Motion WorkShop

| Customer Success Stories

Motion Workshop is a leading developer of inertial motion tracking technology. We founded Motion Workshop to make high quality, easy to use motion sensing technology available to a wider audience. Since its foundation in 2007, Motion Workshop has supplied its MotionNode line of inertial sensing products and Shadow full-body motion capture system to customers in many industries, including video game production, simulation and training, sports science, and biomechanics research.

The Challenge

In the early design phase of the Shadow full body motion capture system, we had a variety of choices to make involving many tradeoffs. The Shadow system is worn on the body and wireless, requiring a responsive data transmission and a sufficiently long battery life.

Many embedded and microcontroller based systems were available which met our requirements for low power consumption, but these systems would have limited the scope of software used, as well as increased software development time.

The Gumstix Overo Fire Computer-On-Module (COM) gave us the best of both worlds – low power consumption, a powerful OMAP3530 processor which could run our software with an open source tool chain, and WiFi for robust wireless data connectivity.

Shadow Motion Capture System

Shadow is is a state of the art, wearable sensor network for full body motion capture. Shadow is portable, wireless and does not require a studio to stream and record performances. No cameras are required. Using miniature inertial sensors, Shadow directly measures the rotations of body and limb segments.

Each sensor orientation drives a segment of a kinematic model of the human skeleton. The result is an accurate representation of the performer's pose with no manual editing required.

Position tracking based off of an advanced kinematic simulation allows Shadow to accurately report the position of the user, yielding extremely realistic recorded motion. The addition of pressure sensing shoe insoles gives the researcher or animator even more information about the user's gait, footsteps, and balance.

Customers choose Shadow for use in animation, training and simulation, sports science, biomechanics research, and gait and posture analysis. The Shadow system is state of the art, yet affordable for small studios, labs, and academic institutions.